Professional: Whew, time to update this... I'll
be back.. former General Manager of Eugene Free Community
network aka efn.org (A Libertarian trying to deal
with people who want to be Collectivist just doesn't work,
especially when they don't do their jobs. I left and 1 year
later they were out of business, sold to the highest
bidder) Currently consulting on various projects, using
mostly Free/Open software. Guru for hire, as they say.

Community:Past President of EUGLUG The
Eugene Linux Users Group. (Which of course means
that nobody else (for more than 2 years) wanted the dirty
job of organizing a bunch of anarchic free
software advocates, I do heck of a lot more, and
promote Linux whenever possible.

Mostly
userlevel bugfixes on a few work related things.
But hoping this will change.

Older stuff
includes Doom Hockey (proving that they
aren't bugs, they're features) and the SPISPOPD FAQ,
responsible for what might be the most annoying
cheatkey sequence ever known. [and someone else
maintains a website for it... odd... things don't
die on the Internet, they just get archived away]

Recent blog entries by sethcohn

Long long time, no post.
Much happened in the last 2 years since my last post. :)
One of these days, I'll write more in my journal about it.
Lessons learned, sometimes hard. Love found, marriage next year. Life is good.

Mostly just want to check in, since I haven't advogatoed in a long time.

Been a while since I posted, though I read advogato
regularly. Still working on why that is. My life is a
mess in some ways, not bad in others... and maybe I'm just
not the journaling type.

9-11 events:

Simply put, while the event is shocking, my opinion of the
media and the masses are confirmed sadly. I am more
saddened by the rampant patriotic bullshit and lack of
awareness than anything else, even the deaths themselves.

I have relatives in NY, and yes, thankfully none of them
were hurt. Yes, I was scared, and if one of them had been
hurt, I'd be a mess right now. No argument there.

And yes, the pain and grief and terror and rage are driving
people right now. Feeling all of that is good.
Acting from that is not. There is a difference.

I had no hope for this country, even before this mess
happened, and I see nothing to change my mind: The US is
screwed up in so many many ways and it's unlikely to change.

ESR voices a valid if unpopular opinion, and he's
personally attacked for it. Fuck all of you who did so.

Bush and others are willing and wanting to go to war,
regardless of the realities or even the logic of such.
Fuck that.

Flag waving patriots who think that "America" really means
something good and true these days: Wake up, or you
continue to earn the stupid American image. Fuck the flag
and learn the truth about what the rest of the world thinks
about ugly American involvements. We are not innocents.

CNN, and the rest of the media (with the exception of BBC
for some odd reason): plastic propaganda machines, all of
you.

Heroes? Yes, there are heroes. Flight 93's brave
passengers who probably saved many lives, even while losing
their own in the process. Firefighters and policemen who
rushed into burning buildings to rescue people, buildings
whose exits should have be fixed the first time a tragedy
happened there and weren't. All of the people who are
giving time and energy to pick up the pieces and breathe
smoke and sweat for hours. Those are the heroes, and
nobody will argue that, will they?

Anyone who picks up a gun or a bomb and goes to kill
someone 'responsible'? Not a hero. Not in my book, and
shouldn't be in anyone else's either. Feel free to
disagree. Many do. But if you so value the 'freedoms' we
have, you cannot argue that my voice isn't as valid as
yours. Freedom to voice the unpopular view is one of the
most important of freedoms.

Now, watch the powersthatbe shut down encryption, privacy,
and myriad other freedoms, all in the name of 'peace'
and 'justice'. I won't join conspriracy theorists who
wonder if the US had a part in the attacks, but it wouldn't
surprise me to one day learn that someone knew
something was going to happen, decided there was no point
in warning people because they couldn't stop it happening
eventually, and decided that a huge horrible event was just
what they needed to let them take charge the way they
wanted to all along.

To end this, I'll quote Niven's law:

F x S = k. The product of Freedom and
Security is a constant. To gain more freedom of thought
and/or action, you must give up some security, and vice
versa.
These remarks apply to individuals, nations, and
civilizations. Notice that the constant k is different for
every civilization and different for every individual.

meta
Well, got some good responses so far to my article, and
hopefully something good will come of it. The more I play
with this stuff, the more I like it.

xvl
Still can't get xvl to work for me. Solved one problem by
hardcoding the directory and now it's got a memory
allocation problem or something.

wiki
Decided to try installing a wiki. Nothing was packaged for
Debian (huh?) with the exception of zope-wiki which is far
overkill, so I grabbed the PHPWiki snapshot tarball and
after some mysql wrangling (wrong table names), it
installed like a charm. rybolov's usually
the mysql/php guy but I can handle it enough to at least
figure stuff out and make it work. PHPwiki is very nice,
much prettier by default than other wikis...

life
With more of my friends (naturedarren,
Kyrgan) joining, I might just find the
discipline to diary more often... we'll see. Life has
been so busy lately, it's nice to be taking it easier.
Leaving a job and entering the marketplace isn't fun,
but so far so good. Ask me again in a few months.

community
Our local Linux user group, EUGLUG has been wrestling
with finding new places to meet having both outgrown the
old and business changes where we meeting. After weighing
all the options, I decided a hiatus for the summer makes
the most sense. Meeting every week on Thursdays and once a
month on Saturdays has taken its toll, and a break is a
good thing, so we can coordinate something with the other
Oregon LUGs as well as find new digs. It was pretty funny
how many regulars reacted to the news with "Well, now what
will I do with my Thursday nights?" Still haven't posted
the news to the mailing list, I'll go do that.

tivo
Tivoed: too many to count - with my new 60 gig HD
addition, the number of movies waiting to be watched is
just perfect, I can pick and choose from about 7 or 8 at
once...plus all of the good shows I season pass, both new
shows and good stuff i missed the first time round.
At the moment: Pups - spoiled kids rob a bank. Thumbs down.

looking forward to
Jay and Silent Bob - Kevin Smith is a god.
Annual fireworks party at my place

I've followed the certification 'problems' with interest,
seeing as I'm rated as Master based solely on 1 Cert for it
from kbob, and I'm working on
lkcl's xmlvl the next
generation of advogato. (Ever notice how Luke ends up being
the TNG guy?)

have a ``show incoming capacities'' link on everyone's
personal page. I had a play with mod_virgule to see how
easy this would be

Please let me know when you get this working, I'd like to
see that... if you get it for virgule, it should work for
xvl also

dmerrill mentioned increasing the number
of seeds from four to ten or so. If you look at the seeds,
however, you will find this:
raph has certified loads of people (at least N, where N is
a number larger than I can be bothered to count) and seems
fairly active. alan has also certified at least N people,
although I don't think he is active here.